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D. J. Bernstein

aaronsw.com

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Re: D. J. Bernstein

#71

Post by mseebach »

tptacek wrote: post #70
alec wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't used qmail, but I use djbdns. The complete installation, possibly including a few patches, is less work than figuring out how to set up BIND's configuration. It's available in Debian from apt-get. It's good that it's so easy to figure out how to use, because I touch it less than once a year, so I've completely forgotten about it. That's great software.

It is hard to imagine the serious, rational, objective argument that could exist for running BIND instead of djbdns, if those are your two choices. There are viable alternatives to qmail (Postfix and Exchange), but there aren't really viable alternatives for djbdns, and djbdns is less opinionated than qmail is.

I've only setup a single BIND server, and chose that due to previous exposure to the zone file format. It got the job done, pretty quickly even, but I'll definitely consider djbdns next time the need arises.

Re: D. J. Bernstein

#73

Post by viraptor »

ErrantX wrote: post #69
known wrote: post #28

Bill Gates

I think you're being a little unfairly downvoted. I don't think anyone would claim Gates should win prizes for minimal or beautiful code. But he certainly did a lot of good programming. In any hall of fame where we mention Linus, Guido and Bernstein we probably do need to mention Gates as well.

And where can we find any of his programs to look at?...

Re: D. J. Bernstein

#74

Post by wheels »

tptacek wrote: post #54

DJB's code is a lot of things, but when someone says "beautiful" is one of them, I start thinking about how I might quiz them to get them to prove that they've actually read it. Smarter coders than me have sat in rooms for nightlong studies of qmail and come to the conclusion that, while clever, the C code in qmail and djbdns has clearly been compiled down from some higher level language[1]. If that code is anything,…

Having read some of DJB's code as well, I also thought, "Huh?" when it was suggested that it was beautiful. One thing that would lead a person to believe the compilation argument is the almost complete lack of comments, as-short-as-possible variable names, etc.

Re: D. J. Bernstein

#75

Post by tptacek »

wheels wrote: post #74
tptacek wrote: post #54

DJB's code is a lot of things, but when someone says "beautiful" is one of them, I start thinking about how I might quiz them to get them to prove that they've actually read it. Smarter coders than me have sat in rooms for nightlong studies of qmail and come to the conclusion that, while clever, the C code in qmail and djbdns has clearly been compiled down from some higher level language[1]. If that code is anything,…

Having read some of DJB's code as well, I also thought, "Huh?" when it was suggested that it was beautiful. One thing that would lead a person to believe the compilation argument is the almost complete lack of comments, as-short-as-possible variable names, etc.

The formatting, the heavy reliance on idiosyncratic CPP macros, and more than anything else the repetitively procedural nature of it is what set off alarm bells for us.

But really that's just the way he codes. It's very intricate. It's like a very ugly Swiss watch.

Re: D. J. Bernstein

#76

Post by ErrantX »

viraptor wrote: post #73
ErrantX wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're being a little unfairly downvoted. I don't think anyone would claim Gates should win prizes for minimal or beautiful code. But he certainly did a lot of good programming. In any hall of fame where we mention Linus, Guido and Bernstein we probably do need to mention Gates as well.

And where can we find any of his programs to look at?...

anything in the first few years of MS.

Altair.BASIC

Re: D. J. Bernstein

#77

Post by vorador »

antirez wrote: post #62
crucini wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I question #3. Why is it admirable to play a role in the languages world? Shouldn't languages be a means to an end? If the end is good applications, DJB showed that you can produce good applications in C. It seems like a lot of the energy around languages is frivolous. It's more fun to play with language features than to attack a real-world problem like writing a mail server. As for #4, why does criticality matter? A…

#3: sure, in general terms. Not true in my opinion for the best programmer of the world. Naturally he is "the one" that can master programming so well that it must be able to drive even programming language designers into more expressive / productive languages. djb can never be the one as in his code is very rare to find high level abstractions. as for #4 it's very admirable to write real world software, but the best…

Writing a text editor is a relatively easy task and it's more a matter of user interface than of implementation. Besides, I don't see why writing a mailer daemon is less important than, say, a text editor.

Re: D. J. Bernstein

#78

Post by shawnps »

Could someone clarify this for me, please? On this page:

http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/intro-dns.html

under the "Multiple Servers" section, he says

"To protect against computer failure, there are actually several root servers, several .to servers, and two yp.to servers."

I don't understand, is he saying there are only two DNS servers in the world that you can contact to resolve yp.to?

Re: D. J. Bernstein

#80

Post by aaronsw »

shawnps wrote: post #78

Could someone clarify this for me, please? On this page: http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/intro-dns.html under the "Multiple Servers" section, he says "To protect against computer failure, there are actually several root servers, several .to servers, and two yp.to servers." I don't understand, is he saying there are only two DNS servers in the world that you can contact to resolve yp.to?

Yes, that's true for most domains. All the other servers have to cache responses from those two servers. (For the record, the two yp.to servers are currently djb's machines dancer and forcewall.)
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